High temperatures and air pollution driving increase in strokes
The number of people having strokes for the first time has skyrocketed 70 per cent in the past 30 years, new research has found.
Researchers found that 84 per cent of the global stroke burden in 2021 could be attributed to 23 modifiable risk factors including air pollution, excess body weight, high blood pressure, smoking, and physical inactivity.
They also found that high temperatures contributing to poor health and early death from stroke alone had risen 72 per cent since 1990, with that trend likely to increase in a nod to the impact of environmental factors on the growing stroke burden.
Between 1990 and 2021, the number of people who died from a stroke nearly doubled — rising 44 per cent — while stroke-related health loss was up 32 per cent in the same period.
And shockingly, the study revealed for the first time that particulate matter air pollution is a top risk factor for subarachnoid haemorrhages, or fatal brain bleeds, akin to smoking, accounting for about 14 per cent of death and disability caused by this stroke subtype.
The study, from researchers at Auckland University of Technology and the University of Washington’s Institute For Health Metrics and Evaluation, was this week published in The Lancet Neurology journal.
IHME lead research scientist and co-author Dr Catherine O. Johnson said it offers “tremendous opportunities to alter the trajectory of stroke risk for the next generation”.
Lead author Professor Valery L. Feigin, from AUT and an affiliate professor at IHME, said the number of people suffering or dying from stroke was growing rapidly, “strongly suggesting that currently used stroke prevention strategies are not sufficiently effective”.
“New, proven effective population-wide and motivational individual prevention strategies that could be applied to all people at risk of having a stroke, regardless of the level of risk, as recommended in the recent Lancet Neurology Commission on Stroke should be implemented across the globe urgently,” Prof. Feigin said.
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